News Comment/COMENTARI AL DIA

The Rich 1% Don’t Know How to Eat/ELS 1% MÉS RICS NO SAP MENJAR

The Rich 1% Don’t Know How to Eat

Fat bankers are too busy selling the Brooklyn Bridge to taxpayers to care about good food. Below: Occupy Wall Street dead set against the rich 1% are wrong. Those who eat well are the tax-paying bourgeoisie, not the tax-evading rich who are just as mediocre as the Communist nomenklatura.

New York is full of extravagantly expensive restaurants where dinner costs hundreds of dollars and a bottle of wine can fetch more money than the average American household makes in a week. Given the amount of cash it takes to eat at such places, it stands to reason that they’re all full of rich people, right? Actually, it turns out that’s not really the case. The rich are misers first and have no taste anyway. Greedy bankers feed from us, not from good food.

The research company Bundle used credit and debit-card spending data to identify luxury spenders. They put together a list of high-end shopping destinations and then identified the New Yorkers who shopped at those places on a regular basis. These luxury spenders constitute 1% of New Yorkers. Bundle then created a league table of restaurants with the highest percentage of those high-spending customers. All of a sudden, we’re able to see which restaurants have the highest percentage of rich people. In fact, all of the places whose clientele consists of more than 15% luxury spenders are low-key. And luxury diners at super high-end restaurants don’t even come close to ranking among the top -at most 3% or even 1% of luxury spenders. One explanation is that they see good menus as more of a challenge than a pleasure. And the rich place a high value on convenience. They’ll go somewhere mutually convenient rather than somewhere noisy and trendy and well reviewed. Proximity trumps quality. Why don’t ambitious restaurateurs follow the money to where the free-spending rich people are? In a free market, shouldn’t good food drive out the bad? When diners do spend hundreds of dollars on dinner at a restaurant the only way a restaurant will keep customers coming back is to offer them an exceptional experience with cutting-edge food. In other words, restaurants that cater to normal people have to be more interesting. Meanwhile, the 1% are perfectly happy at their food troughs.

(“Gastronomics: Where the One Percent Eats,” by Felix Salmon, New York Magazine, 4 January 2012)